Because of how politics being exactly how it’s portrayed on House of Cards and the West Wing and political thrillers, I imagine Northern Labour politicians have had a difficult week this week. Having the bad cop whips put them in nipple clamps and threaten to expose the way they shop at Waitrose (and spend hundreds on Heston Blumenthal ready meals) until good cop Harriet Harman takes them aside and promises a new-build learning community centre cum ciabatta factory for their constituency if they will only agree not to vote against the benefits cuts which will take £300 million out of the North East and reinforce the deadly myths about a big welfare load being the reason we need austerity.

Eight of them resisted. Notably Bishop Auckland MP Helen Goodman, who drew up a motion saying they should reject the bill. She was recently shadow minister for welfare reform, so knows…

Labour has always contained a remarkably, probably impractically wide spread of political opinion. For twenty years, the leadership has been monopolised by the very rightmost bit of that spread of opinion – individuals whose views put them further to the right than some moderate Tories, and on the opposite side of the spectrum completely from the vast majority of Labour members and supporters.

Aggressively defending positions of power in the party from anyone who dared think differently, Labour’s ultra-right has hardened into a sort of grim, entitled political aristocracy – barely acknowledging the existence of, let alone consulting, the foot-soldiers who deliver the leaflets and drive old ladies to polling stations, and instead allying with big business, the corporate media, and obsessing over the swing-seat Tories who, in their eyes at least, offer the most sure-fire route to lucrative cabinet jobs.